This painting is from Klee’s Magic Square series, which grew out of a visit to Tunisia in 1914. Klee embraced the full power of abstraction by fractioning the landscape into squares, which seem to extend beyond the edges of the painting. The squares themselves can be viewed as odd-shaped stones assembled to form a mosaic. The work also reveals Klee’s preoccupation with color theory, which informed his teaching at the Bauhaus.

Sabine Rewald. Paul Klee: The Berggruen Klee Collection in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Exh. cat., The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York, 1988, pp. 202–3, 284, 318, ill. (color and bw), fig. 50 (installation photo), reproduces a 1924 photograph of Klee's Weimar studio showing this picture in an earlier state; notes that after the photograph was taken, Klee altered the colors of some of the squares in the lower right hand corner, and most likely signed and dated the painting in May 1925 when the Bauhaus reopened in Dessau.

Bradford Epley and Christa Haiml inKlee and America. Ed. Josef Helfenstein and Elizabeth Hutton Turner. Exh. cat., Neue Galerie, New York. Houston, 2006, pp. 256–57, cite it as an example of works on cardboard where Klee painted the stretcher in order to integrate it with the picture.